Whose responsibility is it to take care of you?”
I stood before a group of pastors and ministry leaders, inquiring of them as I have countless others. Their responses? Furrowed brows. Perplexed gazes. Sniggers. Eyes rolling. Rarely, if ever, has anyone replied with unsurprised, straightforward confidence and joy, naming the people whose task it is to nurture the souls of the ones who are doing the same for those under their care.
Some answered with a flat report of the facts: The elders of their congregations or their bishops or the boards of directors of their ministries provide what these leaders think I’m talking about. They imagined that I was referring to someone who will “keep them accountable”—someone who ensures they are checking all the boxes of growing attendance, managing staff and finances, expanding a development plan, preaching in a compelling manner, leading in a way that is worthy of public acclaim, showing a deep and proper knowledge of Scripture and culture, avoiding scandals, having the proper point of view and articulation of “what we believe politically,” and doing whatever is necessary to preserve the system.
The list of boxes can feel endless and overwhelming. Moreover, they represent what many ministry leaders quietly, albeit unconsciously, suspect they are becoming: clearinghouses of information. When this is named for those people gathered before me, there is often a communal exhale accompanied by the knowing look of Oh, my goodness. I finally have words that help me understand why I feel so anxious. For indeed, anxious is what many of our ministry leaders are. This is not because they fail to get things done. Rather, like the ultimate source of virtually all anxiety, they are drowning in it because they are alone and they expect no one to care.
We have inadvertently trained ministry leaders to lead in isolation and to believe that more information is the answer to all questions of meaning, as the Enlightenment and modernity have taught us—formed us, in fact—to believe. Indeed, the more information these leaders have, the more they can get done. But the more leaders get done, the more they worry that at some point they will no longer be able to do so. This causes even more worry, which is when they find themselves in my office thinking their problem is that they are anxious. Yet their real problem is that they are alone—with their information, with their version of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Genesis 2:18 is a haunting verse: “The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’” It is not merely a description of the situation on the ground as God was reflecting on the man’s status. It is also a comment that foretold what was coming, a harbinger that echoes through the entire history of the Bible: that to be alone is not good and leaves us, initially, incomplete. Most anxiety is a function of our fear of being alone with ourselves in the anguish of our sin and shame. And when we—in this age—are anxious, we turn to information, for information is power. And power, just as the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil “promised,” is what we believe we need to cope with relationships that we fear we won’t be able to tolerate, our relationships with ourselves not the least.
But my question to the ministry leaders is one of formation, not information. It is a question of wisdom. It is a question that asks “Who are you becoming?” and “How is your presence forming those whom you lead?”
Our culture’s last 500 years, having led us primarily to behave as if we are machines, has us paying less attention to what we are becoming, especially in the church. As “machines,” leaders in ministry have been trained to pay attention primarily to what machines pay attention to—information—rather than to what no machine can deliver: our transformation into living, breathing love, joy, peace, patience, and all the rest, including becoming pulsating sermons on the mount, creatures of forgiveness and peacemaking, followers of the King who suffer with him as a way of becoming people of good cheer.
The leaders who feel isolated do not reflect the experiences of all in ministry. I am aware of formation initiatives within various churches and ministries. There are those whose churches or organizations provide resources outside of the system in which they work to purposefully oversee their formational growth. But this is the exception.
It is this chasm between leaders being conduits of formation vis-à-vis information that in many respects leaves them anxious to the degree that they despair. We know that it’s not only church attendees who are leaving; so are pastors. But neither our congregations nor our priests are leaving because any of us suddenly decided, after being joyfully committed to Jesus for years, “I’m done.” Rather, this has become a long glide path that begins with the absence of presence, just as it was in Eden in Genesis 3.
It was not just the content of the serpent’s conversation with the first couple. It was that it was held in isolation from God. It’s not good for the man or the woman to be alone in the way the serpent was positioning them to be.
Hence, we see the significance of considering the formation of these leaders in the way that the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground: proximally, intimately, purposefully, with a vision for him, his wife, and all of their offspring to become beauty and goodness as they also created and curated beauty and goodness, extending the boundaries of Eden into the wilderness. Being formed is as much about who we become as it is about what we are doing.
We can imagine durable hope for leaders when someone is positioned to listen to and guide their continually unfolding stories long after undergraduate, seminary, or graduate education is completed. These newly discovered facets of the leaders’ stories can become the very soil—often filled with grief and brokenness—that yields a great harvest. For it is in “being with” these leaders that they will discover what it truly means to not be alone.
The presence of God through the presence of those who care for ministry leaders will awaken them to the fact that their own non-anxious, fully attuned presence is a prized offering to those they lead. To fear the Lord is to first be present with him, and to invite him to be present with us. But we do not develop this capacity of “being with” by ourselves. Rather, we do so by continually having access to those who provide for us securely attached relationships that are both compassionate and demanding, for this is what love does.
Who will be with the leader no matter what? If Jesus himself, given his absolute dependence on his Father, did only what he saw his Father doing (John 5: 19–20). How, then, have we come to assume that leaders will flourish without the same need for a hovering, forming presence, especially one that has no inherent stake in the leader successfully delivering all the “information” perfectly?
I have never been more hopeful about the gospel, because I have witnessed the transformation of leaders who once were on the brink but are now again living in the story of formation, not of information—leaders who are becoming the coauthors of others they lead, helping them, even while getting things done, to tell their stories more truly. For you who long for your despair and carnage to be formed into goodness and beauty, for you who look for the heaven you hope for, and to be ready for it when it arrives: I am confident you will find it.
Curt Thompson, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist, author, speaker, and co-host of the Being Known Podcast.
